Phi for All

Because there are no stock photos of the Governor of Florida ordering from a fast-food drive through. He's on a strict diet of unborn babies and the tears of reasoning humans.

! Moderator Note We're a science DISCUSSION forum, not a blog or a wiki site. We also don't allow advertising here, so if you're going to stick a link in to a commercial site later, you'll just be banned as a spammer. Is there some part of your OP you'd like to discuss with the other members?

Can you give us a link or quote to evaluate?

Sure, partly because hundreds of millions of dollars are backing this effort to control an uncontrollable form of media. The RESTRICT Act that's being proposed as a response supposedly protects us from foreign interference, but it will also let the .gov remove anything they don't like under the guise of national security. Only US companies like Facebook will prosper. It's basically like the laws we have that restrict imports on sugar to favor US growers. And the language seems so broad that it can be applied to almost anything they want to stifle. I find it curious that government intervention has so much bipartisan support on an issue involving social media, but having the .gov tell us we have to wear masks to actually save lives meets with bipartisan howls of objection. I've watched much of that congressional hearing, and I've read the reactions from politicians and heard their lame interpretations in enough different sources now that I find their support for this bill suspicious and full of bad faith.

We need some points for discussion. Is this still about that video in your OP? I don't watch videos like that because it seems like they're just made to increase views rather than inform or teach. Can you add some clarity here? Your title implies some physics being applied, but your last post is more like redefining language and terms. I'm not sure at all what you want to talk about.

You have a cynical outlook on what you think is social media, which is making you narrow-minded about how you define it. The dictionary definitions fit this site perfectly. We publish content and share ideas and personal messages over the internet. Most platforms have to suffer a few fools, but I consider myself lucky to have found you lot. Not all social media is like the worst of them.

It's not about wishing to be younger; it's about not wanting to turn into a cynical, narrow-minded old white guy. For me, it's a different way to connect to people I'd never meet otherwise. SFN has been the majority of my social media experience for almost 20 years, and I really value the relationships and what they've taught me. I appreciate the intellectual level here a great deal, and especially the civility. And what I found on TikTok was similar, with the majority of the experience being positive and instructional. I don't follow many scientists there, since I still don't like video for mainstream science, but I follow a really broad range of folks, mostly for perspectives I'm not exposed to much in daily life. To me, it's a voice for those who're supposed to have speech free from government suppression. Security is a concern for all the social media platforms, and needs to be applied across the board. So no, it doesn't make me feel younger, but it's great connecting and supporting others who are more interested in positivity than in peeing on the parades of others and making fun of them. I don't know what this means, but to clarify my comment, the way the committee members kept interrupting with weird comments made me think they weren't interested in getting real answers, which suggests they've been fed these talking points, a standard tactic of lobbying groups.

Facebook spent billions on Reels, which is short video format, and instead of pouring even more money into it, which appears to have worked with YouTube, Zuckerberg chose to spend that money lobbying and smearing the competition instead. One of my favorite TikTok stories is about a woman who'd lived with chronic illness for over a decade, and her doctors weren't sure what exactly was wrong with her, but had her on some expensive medications that only helped a bit. She joined TikTok for other reasons, but ended up posting videos about her daily struggles. Eventually she realized the app was pushing videos about Lyme disease from other creators, and she wondered why. When she watched their content, she recognized her own symptoms. She got a different doctor who confirmed the diagnosis and treated her successfully. The platform also challenges what Americans see and hear about themselves. This morning I watched a journalist from India talking about the US Department of State releasing the latest Human Rights Report, where the US evaluates every other country in the world so we can determine how much foreign aid to give them. We don't list ourselves, of course, since we aren't giving ourselves foreign aid, but we do judge others using criteria we ourselves would fail. US citizens are pretty blind to how much our rights are trampled on. This kind of looking in the mirror isn't very popular with conservatives, who think our children would feel bad about themselves if they knew half the appalling things we as a society have done in the past and continue to do today.

In my experience, the algorithm feeds you more of what you engage with, so I'm unsure how to respond when someone says TikTok is feeding their teen butt chugging vodka videos. Could it be that Chinese culture itself pushes their teens to be interested in science and math, and American culture pushes our teens towards substance abuse, guns, and hating different people?

The CEO of TikTok appeared before Congress yesterday to defend his platform, which has over 150M US users. https://www.reuters.com/technology/tiktok-ceo-face-tough-questions-support-us-ban-grows-2023-03-23/ Democrats and Republicans seemed equally out for blood, and equally unqualified to fairly judge the popular app. Meta and Facebook hired an outside firm for a smear campaign against TikTok, and to me it looks like the committee members have all received lobbying funds from the Big Tech firms to incentivize banning this pesky competitor. Some of the questions asked were phenomenally stupid ("Does TikTok access the home wi-fi network?" asked Rep Richard Hudson from NC), and showed that the legislators were fear-mongering and had no idea what they were talking about. Compared to Twitter and Facebook, TikTok (in my experience) seems more upbeat and positive. The younger generations are embracing it and turning away from the other platforms. To me, it seems like the Big Tech companies want to (ab)use the government to squash an upcoming competitor and blame it on political reasoning. It seems to me they hate that this newcomer is taking away market share and most of their future products/customers. I've had the app for several months and enjoy it, so I'm pretty biased in favor of keeping it. Does anyone think TikTok should be banned in the US?

I did this a couple of hours ago for some barm cakes. The dough rises as it proofs and air bubbles form. You want to knock that down/punch it down/fold it in on itself to break those bubbles up and get the yeast back together with the sugars and moisture and starches to form up a better bond/grain/crumb. It also improves the flavor as it brings the ingredients back together to complete their chemistry. For rustic soup breads where lots of air bubbles are a plus, I never knock the air out, just mostly on sandwich breads where I want an even, tight crumb.

I'd have to see what kind of money your company is sending to its stockholders and C suite before I could assess why they're struggling with finances. I just know virtually every major company blames regulations for their woes, yet they usually don't reduce executive salaries and bonuses as an option.

DP + 1/3(SP – DP) = Mean Arterial Pressure. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30855814/

This is pure industry propaganda. The facts are that industry can't afford NOT to adapt to changing climates, and trillion-dollar losses are predicted if something isn't done to mitigate the impact. About 80% of industry around the globe depends on stable supply chains, and the costs when these are disrupted is staggering. Personally, I think there are some extremist capitalists keeping up this propaganda because they make hideous profits when disasters strike and there's nobody else to turn to, and they see climate change as an opportunity for profit, so they spread the BS that no one can afford it and industry across the globe would collapse, adding that dung to the small-government dung many conservatives spread regularly.

Hopefully around the 20th time you say it, when my face is still a blank, you'll realize you need to point at something, or pantomime what bumbilrorgging looks like, or draw the concept in the dirt with a stick. If you actually tried to say this to me a million times, I'd get my own stick way before you finished. Made to know, like from the womb? No, language is learned. We don't have a lot of innate abilities.

I would add to this that our intelligence offers us a chance to reason beyond appearances, so that our choices are both broader and more meaningful.

Ooooh, I like that! The US has moved away from the extended family and focused on the nuclear family, which is stretched to the point of exhaustion, doesn't have enough bodies to deal with all the problems of modern life, and lives isolated from the help it often needs. Elders don't get to pass on their wisdom or warn us about dangers in the past on a regular basis. I think many folks were raised without the wisdom of grandparents, aunts, and uncles living in the same house, and now we have a couple of generations who lack poise and feel their issues require raising the roof. Grandma would have explained the situation before letting you out of the house with such bizarre ideas. "You want to ban a math text because it references 'social awareness'? Sit your butt down and let me tell you what being aware is all about."

So true, and so unfortunate considering how loudly extremists squeak.

Honestly, I don't think most people "are" the way we think in the US. Most of our sources of news are entertainment based, and talk about big issues using simple words that can be interpreted differently by everyone who hears them. Both sides hear the same words, but one side interprets them as "book banning" and the other side reads it as "protect the children", so both sides think the other guys are inhuman and have ZERO common sense.

I disagree with most of the opening post. Hobbling yourself with so many absolute beliefs (simplicity = good, complexity = bad) is not being objective enough for science. There's no reason why physics has to conform to our concepts of neatness and symmetry. I've never understood why some people demand that the universe be intuitive and simple, when we know it's definitely not. And as far as being able to explain QM to a five-year-old, I think that's just a platitude that seems more reasonable than it is. Some areas of science require more sophistication, or knowledge from multiple disciplines studied in tandem. I think "dumbing it down" for laypeople/children has caused a LOT of problems with understanding (dare I bring up the "fabric" of space popular explanation for gravity again?). In actual practice, demanding explanations simple enough for a child runs counter to our best methodologies. It's a cognitive bias if you're only looking for things you can explain to a child. Clouds must weigh next to nothing if they can float up so high in the air like that, right?

! Moderator Note It's clear that you're filling in gaps in your science understanding with information you've made up, rather than studying until you figure it out. You misuse a LOT of terms, and then you base the next guess on concepts you don't understand. I'm going to close this thread and suggest that you go back to studying, or read some of the excellent threads we have on science subjects.

I think DeSantis is a typical toxic male bully-type, cowardly to the core, so of course he became a lawyer and a politician. He was such a weasel during the pandemic wrt the MAGA anti-vaxxers that he wouldn't even tell the terrified people in the state he runs whether he'd had the vaccine or not (and remember when he bullied a bunch of school kids into taking off their masks before a press conference?). And all these books he's banning are just more red meat for the ignorant base he manipulates. I don't see how this gets past legal review, which makes it a big fat waste of taxes. I think his stances may play well to the bumpkins who voted him in, but once he tries to go on the national stage he's going to have to back off on his extremism, and that's going to make him look weak. When he goes back to being toxic Ronny D then I hope Americans have had enough of it and vote for anybody else. DeSantis is such a lying fascist that apparently he gave a statement that him banning books was a fake news hoax, and then he started listing reasons why he was removing certain books from the schools.

Brad Watson_Miami FL has been banned. If your prerequisite for discussion is that everyone has to take your word about something extraordinary, switch to blogging.

My first hit checking online was CCTV cameras installed in Somalia. Then I really had to wonder why you have to really wonder when you can just check.

This isn't an "uncomfortable issue". It's just plain wrong. You can't tell me how consciousness could exist at the time of the Big Bang, yet you insist that it was not only present, but concentrated. The beginning of your diagram is patently false, and you're reluctant to fix it, so there's really nothing to discuss. Your explanation fails when compared to what we already know about the universe. The only thing that's uncomfortable is your insistence that you're right, even though you admit you can't answer many of my questions, and it's beyond you. That's pretty uncomfortable. I don't know how to help someone who won't listen.